Happy Friday everyone!
I’ve noticed a lot of couples jumping head-first into the online wedding planning pool without first taking necessary steps to safeguard their privacy–specifically, their personal email address.
Do not, I repeat: do not, use your personal email address for any of the endless online registrations you will be asked to fill out on wedding planning sites. The Knot, Weddingchannel, et. al will promptly begin sending you a barrage of unsolicited emails. Some of these are useful…discounts and special offers, for example…but you really don’t want this clutter in your personal inbox. And once the tidal wave starts, it’s next to impossible to stop.
The solution? Create a wedding-specific email address before you even begin, and use this address to fill out as many online forms, contests, registrations, vendor requests, etc. as you like. When the big day is over, you can close the email address and be done with it. It still surprises me how many couples don’t bother to take this simple step.
You can use a public Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! address for this purpose if you like. Or, use WedShare’s email service to create your own email addresses at your wedding website! You’ll automatically be set up with your own webmail browser, and you can connect it to an offline reader like Outlook if you prefer.
Creating your own email address is easy: just access the Email Manager from your WedShare control panel, and enter in the address as you’d like it to read. It will automatically be set up at your website. So if your website is CristieAndSteve.com, you could create an email address like cristie@CristieAndSteve.com, for example.
Create your own wedding-specific email addresses at your website easily with WedShare's Email Manager
Your personal webmail
That’s it! Your email address is now ready to go. To access and customize your email’s online web interface, log in with the temporary password you’re given. All WedShare members have their own personal online web interface, accessible from anywhere you have web access. Just browse to your wedding website appended by ‘/mail’, like: cristieandsteve.com/mail.
You can send and read emails, create and manage folders and filters, create a contact list, plus lots of other great stuff right on your own personal webmail interface. Customize the look and feel, fonts, colors, and behavior of your webmail, too.
Manage emails at your own personal webmail browser
Another mistake I often see couples make is posting their email address(es) on their website or other online correspondence. Because the web is a public medium (unless you password-protect your website or require authentication, another topic), then your posted email can possibly fall into the hands of a spammer or some other online vermin.
But how can you accept emails if your guests and vendors can’t find your email address on your website? Use an online form, like WedShare’s Contact Us page. This will hide your email address from website viewers, while still providing them a means to send you emails. You can then choose who to respond to, who to ignore, and who to block outright.
Set your names and contact email addresses where "Contact Us" correspondence will go
The Contact Us form on your website allows visitors to pick a contact for their message, while protecting your email addresses. Never post your personal email address in the clear!
Remember that you can never be too careful when it comes to your privacy. That’s it for today; have a great weekend everyone!
About Jason
Great advice! My fiance and I were looking to create a separate wedding email address for our save the dates, rsvp’s ect.. I just found an awesome site call wedding.me that allowed me to create custom email address ending in @wedding.me. I found out that organization is important when planning a wedding.